Steel Seed – PS5 Review

Steel Seed is a third-person action/adventure game from Italian developers Storm in a Teacup and it tells the story of Zoe, a woman who finds her consciousness has been downloaded into a robot body by her father in his efforts to enable her to save the planet a millennia after the fall of humanity.

As Zoe gets used to her new body, this gives you, the player, the perfect reason to work through a tutorial which explains all the nuances of running, crouching, jumping, double jumping, climbing and combat.  Along the way Zoe is guided by Koby a beeping robot that only she can properly communicate and, before long, you’ll soon have a grasp of the controls.  But if you’ve played any third-person action game since the original PS1, you’ll know exactly what to expect here.

A mix of parkour and puzzle-based climbing is very much the order of the day here.  The game world is massive and mechanical with a huge visual scope and plenty of industrial machinery to navigate.  Zoe can grip any lit edge and so you’ll be looking for white lines of light to see where to go next.  She can climb, drop down, shimmy and jump horizontally.  So far, so Lara Croft.  But her new body also affords her some decent manoeuvrability and so she can also wall run and cover large distances with her double jumping.

It’s all executed very well by Storm in a Teacup.  The world looks huge, detailed and well-realised and your movement is fluid and intuitive.  There’s a real feel of quality to the game even if it feels rooted somewhat in an era of gameplay that we’d associate more with the PS3/Xbox 360 generation.  But that’s fine with us.  And, thankfully, there’s a bit more to it than running and jumping, albeit not a ton more.

Koby, your floating droid pal, is a pretty useful friend.  You can send him up into the air and control him remotely which then allows him to mark enemies, activate switches and even do some basic combat.  Quite a few of the platforming puzzles involve Koby shooting at a switch to move the platform you’re on and so on.  You can also use him in real-time by holding L2 and then using him to shoot various types of ammo.  He can attack directly, cause distractions or leave traps and tools on the ground.

Aside from all the puzzle-platforming, a big part of the game involves combat and this can be taken on in two ways:  head on or with stealth.  The game is very much designed around the stealth option though.  You can hide behind cover, you can stealth kill from above, below and, mostly, behind and you can set distractions and traps.  Initially the combat encounters are pretty straightforward but by the mid-game you’ll be facing outposts with multiple guards all monitoring each other and so finding the optimal way to clear them all out safely becomes a lot more tricky but also more fun to figure out.

This could all be a bit divisive though.  Old-school Tomb Raider platforming with equally old-school Splinter Cell/Tenchu stealth?  We’re over a decade and two console generations away from that being cool, right?  And, yes, we are but here’s the thing, we really enjoyed it.  We loved Splinter Cell and Tenchu and even games that borrowed from them such as Dark, Vampire Rain (yes, we actually liked it) and various other stealth ’em ups.  And while Steel Seed doesn’t really offer up much in the way of original ideas, it does what it does really well.

But it definitely could all be seen as a bit of a relic of gameplay past.  This is especially true of the world design which is put together just so that only a robot of Zoe’s capabilities could traverse it.  In that way it feels very linear and very much like a game world.  Full of objects that are placed and moved in such a way that it makes for a fun puzzle but would serve literally no real-world purpose.  You’re forever reminded that this is a game.

Along the way, Zoe gets to upgrade herself at stations that act as save points and places where you can heal, re-arm and configure new abilities.  We quite liked the system here though.  Upgrades are bought with currency that you take from looted foes but to even be able to buy them you have to complete tasks – a certain number of dodges, stealth-kills, explosive kills and so on.  It’s quite fun to adapt your fight style to the next upgrade, such as taking out two enemies with one explosive cannister or whatever.  Even if the upgrades aren’t always all that useful, we appreciated earning them.

What helps sell all this is a story that’s pretty engaging (by BAFTA-winning writer Martin Korda) and a world that is very nicely presented.  The visuals are really quite something:  detailed, stylish and with a sense of size and scope that you’d normally only see in higher budget games.  If we’re nitpicking, the world does feel a bit dead at times (I mean, it kind of is as per the story) but there’s so much on screen that you never interact with, just massive industrial landscapes with a very linear path to get through them.  It’s nice though.  And the music and voice acting set the scene perfectly well too.

As a mid-budget game, Steel Seed definitely feels like it’s worth a go.  We’ve seen it as cheap as £32.95 (physical) which is pretty fair.  Overall, this feels a little double-A to us.  It’s not quite got the scale and scope of something like a Horizon, which it shares a few elements with, but this exact game with the best graphics available at the time would have been a hit two generations ago, if that makes sense.  So, now it might feel a little dated and safe but, for us, a bit of platforming and robot ninja stealthing is something we’ve missed and so we’re very happy with it.